Interests:I'm just a quiet simple person with a very quiet simple life living one day at a time..

European Union

Posted 25 March 2013 - 08:48 AM

For the moment I just identified two topics that I would be willing to write about: livecds and antivirus.

From a forum perspective you probably have no interest in participating/reading. My goal is to provide a summarized information to visitors that are not experts in Windows PE (for example) and let other members to add/comment on what is written.

As I said, it is probably not something that would help you albeit your project would qualify to be listed there and rated by others.

I am not sure to have understood correctly the scope, you are IMHO failing to explain it properly (by examples) so I am throwing "a" review on the table, just to see if the new "feature" is what I got till now.

At least seen from here, a "review" of a Linux distro as seen on many sites works more or less like this:

A supposedly "technically enabled" journalist (or wannabe journalist) quickly tests something (which often is the result of months or years of work of many people), doing with it (usually) nonsensical things or doing them along a wrong usage paradigm, then either praises (without any actual reason for) the thingy under exam or (as well without any real reason for) completely rejects it (often bad mouthing in the process the Authors). All of this has usually nothing to do with the merits (or faults) of the thing (basically because it wasn't tested/used properly) but has more to do with the mood of the reviewer or with long time established bias (either in favour of or against) the Author, the publisher or the "philosophy" of the distro/tool.

Usually the review goes at great length describing the (BTW fully automated and easily reproducible by everyone) install procedure, with screenshots and step by step report of it, then (because the review is going otherwise to become too long) adds (sometimes) a mere list of programs that are inside the distro (which are BTW the same or almost the same of *any* other distro) and writes a few comments on the actual GUI looks (which is the only thing he/she briefly tested)

Interests:I'm just a quiet simple person with a very quiet simple life living one day at a time..

European Union

Posted 25 March 2013 - 12:38 PM

More less, I would just add that any person can present a better review and that anyone can call the attention of the writer through the comment system to get details corrected.

I like the potential it has, for example, to help review the different Windows PE projects across the Internet. One single person can always write their own biased version, this application allows a more balanced approach where you can either promote or criticize extensively whatever is being reviewed.

Interests:I'm just a quiet simple person with a very quiet simple life living one day at a time..

European Union

Posted 25 March 2013 - 02:55 PM

I can tell some differences that are relevant:

- Just for products, no random unrelated questions or talks

- Same product can have more than one review by different members

- Generates a summary of results from these reviews

If a forum can do the same kind of thing? Sure. And the forum can also replace our downloads portal currently in place but it doesn't necessarily makes it easier for visitors to find relevant things to download.

As for being a "battle of the fanboys", I could say the same thing about about most forum sites out there. This application needs to be used with good sense as most things in life, in that sense I perfectly agree with Wonko.

So, what is your "verdict", useful or not?

For me, I see usefulness in writing my opinion about some of the tools that I stumble around the day. Write about what I liked and what I didn't. My hope is that within some decades we'd have enough reviews to get a reviewing score that wouldn't basically wrong but actually give some good hints to other fellow users.

A whole new paradigm shift, if you can't get people to use common sense, remove it completely from where there was some (it creates a nice, symmetric status. from a holistic point of view, fighting chaos with more chaos)

- Same product can have more than one review by different members

- Generates a summary of results from these reviews

If a forum can do the same kind of thing? Sure. And the forum can also replace our downloads portal currently in place but it doesn't necessarily makes it easier for visitors to find relevant things to download.

As for being a "battle of the fanboys", I could say the same thing about about most forum sites out there. This application needs to be used with good sense as most things in life, in that sense I perfectly agree with Wonko.

There is nothing "bad" in "Battle of fanboys", as a matter of fact it is a good thing to give them some place to write their nonsense, and keeps them away from the serious talks/contributions, if this idea turns out to be a sort of "Honeypot" for fanboys it will be a very nice addition.

"as is" in the new structure (that it's where it would have been posted if the new structure was already created)

For me, I see usefulness in writing my opinion about some of the tools that I stumble around the day. Write about what I liked and what I didn't. My hope is that within some decades we'd have enough reviews to get a reviewing score that wouldn't basically wrong but actually give some good hints to other fellow users.

Yep with the pace with which software changes,and particularly Linux distro's, this is a very good idea , you can see even now how useful is this review: